Tenderness, p.50
Tenderness, page 50
When Nixon is caught on camera as Jack speaks, he looks shifty and nervous, as if he doesn’t realize the camera is on him while Jack is ‘on’. It’s not a face you could trust. A half hour under the lights, and beads of perspiration are dripping from his nose. The poor man has to take out his handkerchief to mop his face.
For the first time, she feels the force of it sweep through her – Jack might actually take the White House – and there, at the end of the low yellow sofa, she feels a kind of vertigo.
After, Maud arrives to let Jackie know that little Caroline is asleep upstairs. Is she alright where she is for the night, or should she be taken back to her own bed? Maud approaches the sofa and reports in low tones, so as not to disturb the others, that she read Caroline her Madeline book before sleep, and if she is no longer needed, she’ll retire for the evening herself. But she lingers, uneasily
‘I’m grateful, Maud,’ Jackie murmurs. ‘Is there anything else?’
The older woman says nothing but opens her palm and shows her a pink paper stub. ‘I dropped off the films today at Whelan’s.’
Her employer smiles.
‘Of the children’s party, Mrs. Kennedy, from Labor Day…’
‘Yes. Of course. Would you mind holding onto the ticket and picking them up for me when it’s convenient? There’s no rush at all.’
‘I think it is best, Mrs. Kennedy, if I pick them up.’
‘Oh?’ Jackie adjusts the cushions at her back. She still has two and a half months to go, and she’s bigger than she was with Caroline at full term. Her fingers have swollen and her wedding band is tight. She has one ear on the post-debate analysis and one on Maud.
Maud draws closer and drops her voice. ‘Because I saw someone, ma’am, someone at the drugstore you might feel is best avoided.’
Jackie raises a finger, then heaves herself off the couch and joins Maud at the door which leads onto the lawn. ‘Someone?’
‘Mr. Harding, Mrs. Kennedy.’ The woman pauses, uncertain whether she should elaborate. It is important that Mrs. Kennedy is not upset. Her pregnancies are delicate matters. The Kennedy sisters-in-law glance their way. Mrs. Joseph Kennedy does not. The proud mother sits on the edge of the sofa, in the grip of the studio analysis.
‘When I dropped off the films, Mr. Harding of all people appeared for a moment behind the counter. He was wearing some sort of lab coat. I think he must be working in the film-processing room. Isn’t that queer?’
‘Did he say hello?’
‘No. He looked away. I don’t know if he saw me or, if he did, if he remembered who I was. Isn’t it strange that he’s still on the Cape, Mrs. Kennedy? Given that he was…let go.’
Jack’s sister Pat arrives in the room, bearing frosted glasses of 7 Up and bowls of peanuts for the reporters. Rose Kennedy waves Pat out of the way of the set. Rose is telling a reporter how terribly sorry she feels for Richard Nixon’s mother.
Maud waits. Jackie nods, assessing Maud’s report. It is indeed a surprise – Mr. Harding still on the Cape, and only up the road in Hyannis. She certainly would have preferred him gone.
It is three weeks since she reported him to Jack, for trying to get those pictures of her as she swam that Sunday – a misunderstanding, he claimed. Whether it was or wasn’t, he admitted he was one of Hoover’s men, spying on them – a vile thought – and Mr. Hoover, everyone knew, was no fan of Jack’s.
If she were to tell Jack that ex-agent Mel Harding was still in Hyannis, he’d go into that drugstore himself and tell him to pack his bags. But why make more trouble for the man? He’d tried to make amends in his own way. Hoover’s horrible orders weren’t actually his fault. Harding was doing a job, one which even he seemed to regret. He’d tried to atone. He’d given her a copy of her picture from the G.P.O., plus the negative. It hadn’t fixed everything. As Mr. Harding explained, Hoover still had her picture, evidence of her attendance that day. He’d have made copies, with or without the original negative. The thought was sickening.
And there was Mel Harding’s hand – in her mind again – his hand gripping hold and hauling her free of that rip-tide, even though he couldn’t swim. Even though he must have been scared half to death.
So why did it still feel as if he’d caught her in the act of something shameful, when he snapped her at the Grove Press hearing back in May? Jack moved independently in the world. Why shouldn’t she on occasion? She rarely knew his exact whereabouts. Why was she supposed to account for hers?
‘Shall I get your films back for you, Mrs. Kennedy, before Agent Harding – I mean, Mr. Harding – develops them?’
‘That’s quite alright, Maud. If you could simply pick up the pictures for me, that would be a help. Leave it for a time. Perhaps his job at Whelan’s is only temporary, until he moves on or back to wherever he came from.’
Best not to let Maud rush in and draw Harding’s attention to the fact that she, his former ‘charge’, knew he was still in town. Best not to react. Jack was reassured that the man had been fired from the Bureau. Yet could Hoover still be using Mel Harding?
It made a kind of sense…let Jack and her imagine he’d been fired. Then keep him in the area to spy.
Well, let them do their worst. Mr. Harding was no longer allowed anywhere on Irving Avenue or on the beachfront. If she spotted him in Hyannis Port, Jackie was to report the incident to the Secret Service.
There was only one puzzle that remained. For some inexplicable reason, when Jack had telephoned Hoover to complain about the planting of one of the Bureau’s agents – ‘In my house, for Christ’s sake’ – Hoover didn’t tell him about her attending the hearing for Lady Chatterley. She’d waited for the grenade to land, but it hadn’t.
Why hadn’t Hoover told Jack? After all, her presence at the G.P.O. was what seemed to have prompted Hoover to have her spied on in their home. Had he told Jack the truth of her whereabouts last May, Hoover could have used it to justify his ongoing surveillance: ‘Your wife, Senator Kennedy, was found publicly supporting an action in defiance of the government position.’ He would have had Jack on the back foot. So why didn’t Hoover say anything? He had the evidence, and it wasn’t kindness. She knew that much.
She looks back to the roomful of family and guests. Eunice is on her knees, bending the television’s rabbit-ears this way and that while Rose directs. Jackie tells Maud she must return to them, and she bids her goodnight. As she takes her seat again on the couch, a reporter, a woman, from one of the Boston papers, asks her if her bracelet is real gold. She says she doesn’t know. It was a gift. The reporter looks skeptical.
‘I didn’t ask,’ she says tersely.
Another reporter asks her if it’s true that Mr. Kennedy forgot their wedding anniversary on the 17th of that month. It is true, but she merely replies, ‘How thoughtful of you to be concerned about our anniversary when there is so much going on in the world.’
Jackie accepts a handful of peanuts from Pat, although her hand is greasy now and she feels she’ll be sick if she eats them. She watches Maud slip away onto the veranda and recede across the darkened lawn. She wishes she could disappear with her.
Another reporter says, ‘Goodness! You bite your nails!’
She wonders how quickly she can exit the scene.
‘What did you think of your husband’s performance, Mrs. Kennedy?’
All the pencils and pocket-notebooks come out.
Rose turns, too, to listen, her smile vinegary. She thinks her daughter-in-law is too shy, too soft-spoken, to be the wife of a President – although she takes a lovely picture.
‘My husband was brilliant,’ Jackie says on cue, ‘I’m very proud of him.’
They wait for something more. Her mother-in-law waits too, her smile fixed.
‘Now if you’ll excuse me, I must check on Caroline.’
* * *
—
Fifteen miles away, in his motel room on Route 6A, Mel Harding stands and switches off his transistor radio. Things are hotting up. For the first time, it’s clear: Kennedy actually has a shot at the presidency. Hoover won’t be a happy man tonight.
Which is when it starts again – the strobing of the flashlights through the cheap curtains.
So he knows they’re there.
Once or twice a week.
When he finally sleeps, he dreams that yellow dog eyes are looking back at him in the night as he walks to Hyannis Port, to Irving Avenue. He has to keep moving. The dogs are downwind of him, and they’ve got his scent. So he dips off the road into the area known locally as the Great Marshes. He can smell the stagnation, the rot, but it’s either the route of the stink, or risk the dogs. The ground gives way underfoot, he has no idea how deep the bog might get, or if he’ll step into a murky pond and drown in the night – anonymous and known to no one, with no one to come looking – when he awakes to the sound of dogs, actual dogs, barking outside.
Each night, his new and seemingly permanent neighbors in the next room lock their hounds in their station wagon, with the windows wound down an inch or two for air. The car is parked right outside in the lot, outside his window. Nebraska plates. The four dogs sound like fifty. Something has startled them: Hunter, Killbuck, Racer and Snap.
‘Great names,’ he said, when he was ‘introduced’ the day before by the owners.
If you live in a horror movie.
Mr. and Mrs. Dagenhart are a tall, stooped couple in their mid- to late sixties. They were fixed on chatting, on being neighborly, as they prepared the bowls of ‘feed’ – butchers’ off-cuts – on the low motel porch they shared. Mr. Dagenhart explained that the recommended blend was five percent liver, five percent other organs, ten percent bone, and eighty percent meat, fat and ligaments. On holidays, he said, the ‘doggies’ got ground venison.
The four go wild every time Harding goes in and out of his room.
He rolls over and pounds his pillow. His sheets are clammy with sweat. His hands are getting worse, what with the daily splashes of fixatives from the processing room at Whelan’s. He thinks he might lose his mind if he has to develop one more snapshot of a kid on a swing. He wonders if he’ll ever touch a woman again.
He can’t get back to sleep. Let them shine their damned flashlights into his room. Let them tail his car. It was only standard Bureau harassment. The agents who were on the case were just following orders. It wasn’t personal. ‘You leave the Bureau but the Bureau never leaves you.’ That wasn’t news.
He only wished they’d left him his copy of the novel when they ransacked his room. It had calmed his brain when he couldn’t sleep. Plus, he’d found himself actually enjoying the story of the solitary gamekeeper and Lady Chatterley. He’d even started to understand the gamekeeper’s dialect. Would she leave her husband for a man like that?
Usually, he just read dime-store pocketbooks, detective novels mostly. Sometimes, they drove him crazy, getting the details wrong, but he kept his expectations low.
He had wanted to say more about the book to Mrs. Kennedy. He’d wanted to thank her, for introducing him to it, the day the Professor came for lunch. But of course, she hadn’t introduced him to it. Not at all. She hadn’t intended to read it aloud to him, of all people – not to her intruder.
* * *
—
In Gray’s Inn, Michael Rubinstein, Instructing Solicitor for the Defence, was bent over his desk. The trial at the Old Bailey was to begin in less than a fortnight, and nothing could be taken for granted.
On the ‘good news’ side, both T. S. Eliot and Dame Rebecca West had ‘come around’ and submitted their respective witness statements. Dame Rebecca’s was not as ‘staunch’ as he might have hoped, but he believed she would rise to the occasion when called to the witness box.
Tom Eliot, on the other hand, had been scrupulous and generous, if understandably strained, given the fact that his youthful criticism of the novel might well be flaunted in court by the Prosecution. It could, potentially, get quite embarrassing for him.
Tom had been a long-time friend of Jeremy Hutchinson’s, the Junior Defence Counsel’s, father, St John Hutchinson – otherwise known as ‘Jack’. Indeed, Jeremy had helped Tom overcome his nerves and volunteer to testify. In a lovely quirk of fate, Jack Hutchinson had defended Lawrence’s confiscated paintings in 1929, just as his son, Jeremy, was now to defend Lawrence’s final novel. Lawrence had written Lady C. in the mornings and painted the controversial canvases in the afternoons, not realising he would one day rely upon the expertise and goodwill of both Hutchinson Senior and Junior. Rubinstein decided it was a good omen.
Altogether less welcome was a warning he’d had by letter three days before, from a trusted source, reminding him of something everyone on the Defence team had hoped to ignore, himself included: namely, Lawrence’s references in Lady Chatterley’s Lover to a sexual act ‘which (I believe) English law holds to be criminal’.
Bugger, thought Rubinstein.
Precisely, said the Censor in his head.
The letter of caution referred him to, for example, page 280 in which Sir Clifford says, ‘if a man likes to use his wife, as Benvenuto Cellini says “in the Italian way”, well that is a matter of taste.’
On the day the information arrived, Rubinstein copied the letter and added a note for his researcher. Could he confirm, please, the meaning and etymology of the phrase ‘in the Italian way’?
The answer arrived by the second post. Rubinstein quickly scribbled a few lines to Gerald Gardiner, Senior Counsel for the Defence. ‘ “The Italian manner” is sodomy. See Penguin Cellini, pp. 280–283.’ Then he noted: ‘You are contacting Bull on this one.’
He felt quite sure that ‘Bull’ – Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, Attorney General of England and Wales – had little sympathy for the plight of the book. Now he was likely to have even less.
As for the passages on pages 258, between Mellors and Lady Chatterley, well, Lawrence was hardly helping his own defence. ‘It was not really love…It cost her an effort to let him have his way and his will of her…’ Rubinstein sighed. What could any of them do but hope that the Counsel for the Prosecution’s attention to detail might have wavered by this point in the novel; or that the references might be sufficiently veiled. If not, a jury would almost certainly return a guilty verdict. What choice would they have? To not do so would seem to sanction a ‘criminal’ act.
His own careful words to Sir Allen Lane tugged at the back of his mind. ‘There can be, I think, no question of prison sentences for the Directors of your Company or anyone else concerned with the publication.’ Perhaps he should have underscored ‘I think’. But doubts would serve no one now. The case was in motion. What could they do but go forward and be of good courage?
He returned to the preparatory notes he had been dictating into his desktop Dictaphone, particularly for their lead barrister, Gerald Gardiner, QC. He pressed the record button on the reel-to-reel and resumed: ‘Mellors tells Connie that the “right relation with a woman” is “the core” of his life (page 213) and then (page 215) says, he has no satisfaction, unless she “got hers of me…It takes two.” Worth noting. At the bottom of the page, “warm” is used seven times and “tender” twice. On page 216, Mellors says, “I’d rather die than do any more cold-hearted fucking”, repeating what he has said earlier that if the “right relation” is not achieved, then he will do without. This, surely, is the profound point.
‘The Prosecution is, of course, hypocritical among a body of men for whom the word “fuck” is a multi-purpose verb, used daily and with great feeling by all ranks. I think we all agree that the Prosecution will suggest that this commonly used but uncommonly printed word, “fuck”, is obscene and therefore has the tendency to deprave and corrupt as printed and published in this book.
‘What I do not understand is whether they assert that, when “fuck” appears ten times on a page, its tendency is to deprave or corrupt ten times over, or whether, after reading that page, the reader is likely to be ten times as depraved and corrupted as he or she was after reading the word once, or whether the law of diminishing returns might apply so that he or she is likely to be less depraved or corrupted, or even ten times less likely to be depraved or corrupted than the first time he or she read the word “fuck” on the page—’
He looked up, startled.
Four women were standing in his open doorway
‘I’m sorry to interrupt, Mr Rubinstein,’ said his secretary, colouring. ‘I did knock, but I don’t believe you heard.’
It was evident, however, that they had heard, in full, his disquisition on the word ‘fuck’.
At the threshold, the women presented an echoing trio of profiles: Barbara Lucas Wall, her daughter Bernadine Wall, and a woman who could only have been Barbara’s eighty-year-old mother, Madeline Meynell Lucas.
He pressed the stop button and rose clumsily to his feet.
‘Apologies, Michael,’ said Barbara. ‘We came only on the off-chance, but clearly we’ve chosen an inopportune—’
‘Not at all, not at all! The apologies are all mine! Ladies, do forgive me – dicky ear since the war. Please, please come in. Barbara, it is a lovely surprise! Your timing’ – he smiled – ‘is impeccable.’
He quickly assessed his three visitors. Barbara Wall was embarrassed and would soon reach for any excuse to leave. The faces of Dina and her grandmother, however, were warmed by the same expression of glee at the accidental comedy of his ‘textual analysis’.
Madeline Meynell Lucas of Greatham, Sussex, the widow of the slain and defamed Perceval Lucas, had arrived at this juncture of events, he knew, against all odds. She was breaking a vow she had made to her dead mother. She was overlooking the injury done to her husband, herself and her child. She was offering him, Rubinstein – and the traitor Lawrence himself – the gift of her bright, book-loving granddaughter.
